The reality is more quietly instructive. When a surveyor visited in 1997, what had been catalogued as a single enclosure turned out to be one of three, all built in the same manner and all almost certainly dating from after 1700. The history here is not prehistoric; it is rural and post-medieval, and none the less interesting for that.

The enclosure measures roughly 22 metres in diameter, with walls standing between 0.4 and 0.8 metres high and between 0.4 and 1 metre wide. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar, relies instead on the careful stacking of stone so that the weight and fit of each piece holds the whole together; it is a technique with deep roots in the west of Ireland, where stone is plentiful and lime was not always at hand. This particular enclosure is conjoined with a neighbouring one to its north, the two sharing a wall and forming part of a small cluster of three. Structures like these, post-dating 1700, were most likely used for agricultural purposes, perhaps as stock enclosures or field divisions, built by farming communities working the land in the centuries before the Famine reshaped rural Ireland so profoundly.